Women's Watches Are Trending Right Now - Here's Why You Should Care

This week, the new model line from Swiss watchmaker Baume & Mercier started to arrive in retail outlets. It’s called the Promesse collection, and it's not for you — it's for her.

This is the first collection for women that Baume has produced in more than a decade. They’re not alone in doing so: Roger Dubuis and Ralph Lauren are among the many other brands that have launched women’s models this year, so you could definitely say that it’s becoming "a thing." How much of a thing worth your attention it is, however, is what I’ve been trying to ascertain.

When I first caught on to this emerging trend, at the SIHH watch show back in January, I was skeptical. At that time, the watch industry was coming off a rough year: many brands had been anticipating a buying frenzy among Chinese consumers that had not materialised. Their revenues were slimmer as a consequence, and my cynical side saw the new women’s models as a cash-grab to make up the difference. When one of the brand managers opened his presentation of their women’s line by saying, "Women love jewelry…", I was aghast. Surely they didn’t think that pasting diamonds onto a watch would awaken female appetites for it? Surely women prize and seek out the same heritage, engineering, and craftsmanship in a watch that a men do... right?

The truth was that I didn’t know. To get any sense of what women thought about watches — if they cared about them at all, what qualities they appreciated in them, if they would welcome one as a gift — I needed to observe the dynamic first-hand. So I asked the PR people at Baume & Mercier if they could loan me one of their women’s models for my wife to wear. My wife has zero interest in watches; I see her face glaze over when I talk about them. Would wearing one for a week change that? Because the Promesse model was not yet available, the watch they supplied me with was the 30mm Clifton automatic. It was important to me that the watch she try be an automatic — after all, a watch isn’t a "real watch" unless it’s an automatic. At least that’s what my male brain thought… and herein lay my first learning.

The Quartz/Automatic Distinction Doesn’t Really Exist For Women

I am making something of a generalisation here. And I do know plenty of female watch connoisseurs who wouldn’t consider wearing a quartz watch any more than their male counterparts would. But my wife and the dozen-odd women that reacted to her Clifton over the course of the trial week couldn’t have cared less about whether or not there was a battery on the inside. If you're shopping for a watch as a gift for her, this is, quite literally, valuable knowledge. The automatic Clifton model that she was wearing is priced at $3,400; its quartz equivalent costs $2,300. There’s a similar price gap between the automatic and quartz versions in the new Promesse model line.

So the price is right. But there are a couple of other factors you should keep in mind...